Patients in hospital units are typically connected to an assortment of pumps and monitoring devices via myriad tubing and cords. These tubing and cords easily tangle and intertwine when the patients move, leaving a jumbled mass. The two primary reasons behind the tangling of these tubing and cords lie within the standardized length and packing of these lines. Lines are manufactured in standardized lengths, and cannot be dynamically changed. Therefore, in the hospital environment healthcare workers are often forced to use lines that are too long. Furthermore, due to the coiled packaging of the lines, some retain a coiling conformation when lengthened, akin to a telephone cord. Hence, the lines are easily tangled and difficult to untangle. When the lines tangle, they limit patient mobility, complicate patient monitoring and intravenous (IV) drug and fluid delivery, both of which create a patient safety issue. The healthcare worker is then forced to spend considerable amounts of time untangling the cords, a laborious process which consumes time that the worker would have otherwise spent administering actual healthcare to the patient.
For example, a typical patient in a post-operation recovery unit after coronary artery bypass graft will at a minimum have cords attached to them for monitoring ECGs, non-invasive blood pressure, and blood oxygen saturation. The patient will typically also have more than one intravenous line, an arterial line, and perhaps even a peripherally inserted catheter. Furthermore, any one of these lines could have multiple lines piggy-backed onto them. Additionally, there is usually another line delivering oxygen to the patient's nasal cannula. So for this patient, there are at minimum seven different lines that can tangle. All of these lines have significant slack, to give the patient some range of motion, but all this extra length only facilitates tangling. Most problematic are the intravenous, arterial, and peripherally inserted lines. Once the IV lines become tangled, it is essential that they be untangled for the healthcare worker to ascertain which line delivers which drug and is connected to which corresponding pump so that proper medication and dosing can be administered to the patient. Finally, in addition to patients moving their limbs or adjusting their posture, patients are generally moved from bed to chair and vice versa every two to three hours, they also typically ambulate every four hours, and patients may also be transported for diagnostic tests. Each time the patient moves, the lines tangle and must be untangled.